Taiwan's Naturist Passport

A Taiwanese performance artist has launched a "naturist passport" in the hope of rallying enough support for a demonstration calling for nude beaches on the island.
The story was frontpage news Saturday in the China Times, one of Taiwan's four main Chinese-language daily newspapers, and also made it on to the 24-hour television news stations.
In a frontpage picture, female performance artist Juan Jen-chu posed with a huge copy of what looked like your average Taiwanese identity card, with the national flag in one corner, but with a picture that obviously showed she wasn't wearing much clothes during the photo shoot. The passport bore the number 001, while a 70-year-old man who returned from Canada has the 002 passport.
Three articles inside the paper expanded on Juan's ideas and on the subject of naturism in Taiwan, a densely populated island of 23 million people with nevertheless still some beautiful remote sceneries and small islands. Juan gained national fame when she posed nude at a public arts festival in the southern city of Kaohsiung as part of a performance. Naturists in Taiwan are being treated like gays, she says, people respect their rights but prefer not to have one in the family. She would like to recruit "hundreds" of people to apply for the passport and hold a march for the legalization of nude beaches. Under present Taiwanese law, all public nudity is being treated as obscene and can result in legal action. Another naturist activist has declared the last Sunday of each August as "Taiwan Naturist Day," but so far without large publicity.
Most of present naturist activities take place inside small hotels and bed & breakfast places in the mountainous central county of Nantou, in sparsely populated Taitung on the southeast coast, and in the Penghu archipelago half way between Taiwan's main island and China. The country counts about three web sites dedicated to naturism, with four or five independent naturist groups with a total of 200 to 300 people, according to the China Times.
Like on all other fronts, Taiwan also makes contacts with China on the naturism front. One of the top supporters of naturism in the communist country, Fang Gang, reportedly visited Taiwan to learn from its modest experience with naturism. Fang wants an island in southern Guangdong Province, the Zhuhai Temple Bay Island near Macau, to set up a naturist beach.
As to Taiwan, Penghu once considered the possibility of a naturist beach. The islands - mostly famous for being mentioned in the movie "Spy Games" with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford - have taken a more conservative turn, the China Times reports. On the contrary, Taitung County has some supporters. The current county government chief secretary, Chen Chin-hu, says the region is extremely well suited to host relaxing and environmentally friendly activities. As long as the law is respected, he sees no problem with setting up special naturist areas in either the mountains or on the coast. County council member Huang Chiu-tsai once mentioned a special naturist area as a way to promote tourism to the region.
Two private naturist groups reportedly visit Taitung four or five times a year, a hotel owner told the paper. Such activities can be healthy, natural and legal, he concludes in the China Times report.

Nudity, Art and War

Kinmen, pronounced Jinmen and also known as Quemoy, is a small island off the coast of the Chinese province of Fujian that only makes the international press for its past as a frontline battle zone in the war between communist China and pro-Western Taiwan.
There are no naturist beaches, just like the rest of Taiwan, since public nudity is strictly forbidden, no matter the reason.
So when local filmmaker Tung Chen-liang went to show his documentary about the past wars on Kinmen to a government organization known as the Control Yuan, noone was expecting nudity.
But that was exactly what they got. In addition to pictures of the battle zone, and old martial propaganda songs from both sides - the songs in praise of Mao Zedong would never have been allowed in Taiwan until recently - just a couple of minutes into the movie, a completely naked young woman appeared, walking through a military graveyard, looking around, touching the graves. Taiwanese media reported there was full frontal nudity, though in good Taiwanese tradition, the TV stations covered the dangerous bits with a "mosaic" of pixillation. The picture that made the press was the one showing the woman lying naked next to the grave of a soldier.
Public reaction in Taiwan was mostly negative to neutral, with the director defending his choice of a naked woman as an attempt to the console the spirits of the war dead.
Regardless of this segment's real artistic value, the documentary, which is hardly likely to make it to Taiwanese TV in its present form, is the latest example of how nudity and art coexist in a difficult way in most Asian countries.

Naturism in China: So Predictable

China is going to open up a naturist resort, I read about a week ago. Excellent news and a major breakthrough for naturism in such a huge country. But it's also a Communist and a conservative country, so what happened afterward was no surprise.
The naturist resort never opened, because it received a letter from the authorities telling it not to be 'indecent.' When you receive a letter from the authorities in China, you do what you're told and nothing else.
Is this an enormous setback? No, because if there are already people ready to promote naturism now, there will be more so later, as more Chinese get acquainted with naturism, either through the Internet or by travel overseas.
Having said that, I must add that the resort planned for Lin'an County in the economically prosperous coastal province of Zhejiang was not a naturist holiday center the way we understand it overseas. Rather, it was naturism 'with Chinese characteristics.' Which means men and women were completely separated. There were two natural ponds, one for women, one for men, separated by 100 meters and a thick bamboo grove which would have made contact between the two sides impossible. In other words, more a hot springs resort Japanese style than a naturist resort European style.
You can read more about the Chinese naturist resort and its demise at http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_407189.html and at http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2009/200907/20090727/article_408735.htm.
As to nudity in Taiwan, a positive development: after the police at the Kaohsiung World Games telling the Brazilian topless athletes on the beach to cover up, I'm glad to hear that the Taipei Deaflympics - the next big sporting event in this country, next September - is likely to take a more liberal attitude toward nudity. One of Taiwan's top models, Patina Lin Chia-chi, will be asked to perform completely nude but covered in body painting at the opening ceremony. I hope to report more on that when it happens.
The Taiwanese media this week also suddenly reported about Les Bleues, France's national women's football team, undressing completely for a series of pictures destined to attract more attention to the female side of the sport. Why the Taiwanese media reported about this now, I don't know, because an Internet search showed me this was news in France back in April. Anyway, I'm not complaining, because even at this late date, it tells the public that nudity is not wrong if it's tastefully done for a good cause.

Nude and Pregnant

Yes, Demi Moore did it before, and many have followed since. But in Japan, where public images of nudity are still extremely rare and frowned upon, the picture of a nude pregnant woman on the front page of a newspaper is still something to be talked about. So much so, that the recent case even found its way to news broadcasts overseas, in this case Taiwan.
Hitomi Furuya is a pop singer who sold more than 8 million records over the past decade under the name of hitomi. While not as well known as Ayumi Hamazaki or Namie Amuro, she nevertheless can be counted as one of the top singers in celebrity-crazed Japan.
Obviously, she did not pose nude and pregnant without a reason. There is a new album to be sold, so stirring up some talk came in handy. Nevertheless, having a pregnant woman pose naked is a positive thing for naturism and body image. It shows you don't have to look thin or near-emaciated to have a beautiful body and show it off. Naturism is for every body, not just the young and sexy, as many Internet forum posters still seem to believe. Each time you read an article about nude beaches, there is the unavoidable 'complaint' that there are too many people, that they are disgusting, that they should not be showing themselves to others.
A true naturist knows that naturism is not about showing off, but about enjoying nature in one's most natural state, regardless of age, gender, or looks.
Look for a picture of hitomi at http://hitomilovelife.net/index.html and skip the introduction.
Meanwhile, over in China, students at Shanghai's Fudan University, one of the country's most renowned institutions of learning, decided to mark their graduation a little bit differently. They had nude pictures taken, some of them frontal nudity, while running about at night or posing inside buildings. The pictures were just good fun, ended up on the Internet, and on TV shows across the region. A comparison was made to the famous nude student runs at a Philippines university, a tradition which has been going on for decades. Maybe the new economic power and the boom in lifestyles and modern international tastes in China will also include an interest in naturism. Recent reports also mentioned the reopening of a nude beach somewhere in Sichuan, China's most populous province, which suffered a massive earthquake last year.

Zhang Ziyi

Pictures of Chinese superstar Zhang Ziyi showed up all over the Asian media yesterday. Zhang in a red bikini, Zhang topless, Zhang with hardly anything on walking and suntanning on a beautiful beach with her boyfriend.
Is the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" actress a naturist? Hardly likely, but she obviously does enjoy sunbathing without the illogical hindrance of a bathing suit.
While Zhang was absolutely right to undress on a beach, there were two things absolutely wrong.
First of all, the pictures themselves. Zhang was not on a public naturist beach or otherwise, but on a private beach on a private island near the French Caribbean island of St. Bart. The small island is reportedly owned by her boyfriend, New York businessman Vivi Nevo. In other words, there shouldn't have been a photographer there. If a beach is private property, you ask the owner before you shoot pictures. It's that simple. 81 pictures of Zhang in various poses and stages of undress were posted on Chinese and Hong Kong pictures, and then shown again in newspapers and on TV stations all over the region. We're not doing so because we believe in privacy. Shooting pictures on a beach is allright, but shooting pictures of a particular person can only happen if you first bother to ask and obtain her/his approval. On a naturist beach, the rule in principle is that you don't take pictures of other persons.
The other thing that was absolutely wrong was the alleged reaction of many Chinese Internet surfers to the Zhang pictures. They didn't condemn the photographer, but Zhang, for "losing face," for taking off her clothes on a beach, for frolicking with her boyfriend. A completely wrong reaction, blaming the victim instead of the perpetrator, but understandable up to a point if you've ever been on an Asian beach where it sometimes looks like even the bikini has not been imported yet.
I just hope the whole paparazzi circus is not going to turn Zhang Ziyi off from topless or nude bathing. If you were on a private island, would you want to wear a swimsuit?